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To Punish Russia The ‘Liberal Order’ Attempts To Suicide Itself
Two days ago we looked at why Russia is doing what it does:
Russia understood Zelensky's remark in Munich as a threat by Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. It already has the expertise, materials and means to do that.
A fascist controlled government with nukes on Russia's border? This is not about Putin at all. No Russian government of any kind could ever condone that.
I believe that this credible threat, together with the artillery preparations for a new war on Donbas, was what convinced Russia's government to intervene by force.
The 'west' had failed to understand Russia's need to act. It has failed to make the necessary commitments, and accept Russia's reasonable demands, to avoid the struggle. In consequence it will now fall apart. The knee-jerk reaction to Russia's 'special military operation' in Ukraine will, as Alastair Crooke writes, lead to the end of the 'liberal order':
So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning China?
Will this last? It seems improbable. German industry has a long history for staging its own mercantile interests before wider geo-political ambitions – before, even, EU interests. And in Germany, the business class effectively is the political class and needs competitively-priced energy.
Whilst the rest of the world shows little or no enthusiasm to join with sanctions on Russia (China has ruled out sanctions on Russia), Europe is in hysteria. This will not fade quickly. The new ‘Iron Curtain’ erected in Brussels may last years.
But what of the unintended consequences to last Saturday’s ‘sanctions Blitzkrieg’: the ‘unknowable unknowns’ in Rumsfeld’s famous mantra? The unprecedented switch-off affecting a key part of the Globalist system did not download into a neutral, inert context – It developed into an emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere of Russophobia.
Now reality comes back to bite the inept minions who attempt to rule over us.
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Europe can not sustain this, Russia can:
In sum, the changes set out by von der Leyen and the EU, with surging crude oil costs, could potentially tip global markets into crisis, and set off spiraling inflation. Cost inflation created by energy costs spiraling higher and food disruptions are not so easily susceptible to monetary remedies. If the daily drama of the war in Ukraine starts to fade from public view, and inflation persists, the political cost of von der Leyen’s Saturday drama is likely to be European-wide recession.
“Since well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been struggling under the weight of runaway energy bills”, OilPrice.com notes. In Germany, for some, one month’s energy costs the same as they used to pay for a whole year; in the UK the government has raised the price cap for energy bills by a whopping 54%, and in Italy a recent 40% domestic energy cost hike could now nearly double.
The New York Times describes this impact on local businesses and industries as nothing short of “frightening”, as all kinds of small businesses across Europe (prior to last week’s events) have been forced to cease their operations as energy costs outweigh profits. Large industries have not been immune to sticker shock either. “Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks … For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”
And it is not only Europe. Energy prices are based on global markets. As are the prices for many other minerals and metals which have suddenly become rare:
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The U.S. will be hit just as much as Europe. Early today oil prices in Europe hit $139 per barrel, well above last week's market close. They will increase further. Gasoline prices in the U.S. will soon hit $6-7-8 per gallon.
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The attempt by the U.S. to rush towards a new Iran deal to get Iranian oil flooding the markets has failed. Russia, together with Iran, has successfully blocked that move. Sanctions on Russia mean that Iran can not export its enriched uranium to Russia to be turned into nuclear fuel. No Iranian export of enriched uranium means no JCPOA deal. Secretary of State Blinken has failed to understand that. The supposedly ready to be signed return to the nuclear deal is now in jeopardy.
Some U.S. refineries at the south coast are designed to only process heavy oil variants. Since 2019 the U.S. has blockaded heavy oil imports from Venezuela and replaced them with imports of heavy Ural variants from Russia. It has now send too officials to Caracas to try to get Venezuela's oil flowing again. That would of course require to lift all sanctions off Venezuela and to return all confiscated companies and the gold that is owned by that country. It is not going to happen anytime soon.
High end German cars are build with aluminum from Russia. Boeing needs Russian titanium to build planes. These manufacturers will soon start to lay off people. All this while food, heating and mobility costs will increase dramatically. A deep recession combined with strong inflation will rip social cohesion apart. I do expect strong anger in the streets of Europe and the U.S. There will be riots and in consequence a strong political move to the right. The mid-term elections will destroy the Russophobic Democrats.
Michael Hudson notes the immense strategic damage the U.S. has done to itself:
The recent escalation of U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.
So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving dollar diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States. But U.S. officials are forcing them to overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.
This will not just happen with China or Russia but the whole world will over the next years turn away from the dollarized U.S. system:
Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take. But “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO confrontation with Russia has passed critical-mass level. It no longer is just about Ukraine. That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.
The next showdown may come within Europe itself as nationalist politicians seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other Allies to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment. The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while relinquishing their democratic electoral politics to subordination to America’s NATO proconsuls.
These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.”
All the consequences of the 'west's' reaction to Russia's move were foreseeable. It is pure recklessness and stupidity that have allowed them to take place. The 'west' will now get punished for the bad movie it has launched.
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Too bad that I don't speak Russian … It is now the place to be.
Jimmy Salford @1Fubar – 7:06 UTC · Mar 6, 2022
Russia has already been cut off from CNN, Pornhub and Facebook. The US is now working on depriving Russians of MacDonalds and CocaCola. If they keep going with these sanctions, Russians will soon be among the healthiest, well adjusted and best informed people on the planet.
Now that access to Russia’s MFA has returned I can provide the following excerpt from Lavrov’s 25 February presser (yes, that website’s been suppressed that long) My emphasis throughout:
“Question: President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev’s willingness to hold talks but there is a need for security guarantees that nobody is allegedly giving. Is Moscow ready for such talks? If yes, what are the terms?
“Sergey Lavrov: President Zelensky has lied and cheated. He mentioned talks in at least two dimensions. First, he bluntly refused to fulfil the Minsk agreements while appealing to his Western patrons to convene Normandy format meetings, with or without a reason, and did not guarantee that these meetings would produce any real results. His appeals were designed to replace what he had to do to implement the agreements reached at the previous rounds of talks.
“The second example of President Zelensky appealing for talks was to negotiate an accession to NATO and the granting of NATO security guarantees. All this was done in the open and quite recently. Everyone heard it. There were other threats in this vein, notably that Ukraine would be free of the commitment to not have nuclear arms if it were not protected in accordance with the Budapest Memorandum. I hope everyone read this memorandum. It says nothing about a commitment to recognise anti-government coups and meet a regime halfway that announced genocide against part of its own people by objecting to the Russian language, Russian education, and many other things that belong to Russian culture and are an inalienable part of Ukrainian society, including the Orthodox Church. Following the example of his predecessor, former President Petr Poroshenko, Zelensky is destroying this church. So there were plenty of opportunities that President Zelensky missed.
“We suggested discussing security guarantees in December of 2021. He was well aware of this. The only condition was to fulfil the demands of the agreements that were signed at the top level at the OSCE. I am referring to the commitment not to try to enhance one’s own security at the expense of the security of others. He did not want to abide by this commitment. Likewise, his Western patrons did not want to fulfil their commitments as expressed in this phrase, in these words. Everyone was saying that the freedom to choose an alliance as a means of ensuring Ukraine’s security was sacred. This is why he is not telling you the truth now. In simple terms, he is lying when he says he is willing to discuss a neutral status. We proposed many options for ensuring security. President Vladimir Putin talked about this at a news conference following his talks with President Emmanuel Macron. He bluntly said that NATO’s expansion was unacceptable but that we wanted to seek, at joint talks and through joint efforts, security options that would guarantee the relevant conditions, opportunities and requirements for Ukraine, the European countries and, of course, the Russian Federation.
“Our December 2021 initiatives on ensuring security aim at searching for guarantees outside the expansion of military-political blocs, primarily NATO. So, President Zelensky’s missed opportunities are well known and it is useless to try to lay the blame at the wrong door.”
Some “journalists” are extremely stupid. Perhaps it was asleep for over a month or sequestered on a desert island divorced from learning current events. And again, we see th]e same behavior in the following question:
“Question (retranslated from English): What is the purpose of this operation? Is it to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky? What is the exit plan? You say you don’t want to occupy Ukraine, but how are you going to withdraw Russian troops after Russia puts in a pro-Russian government?
“Sergey Lavrov: I refuse to think that a journalist from a major media outlet like yours failed to read the address by President Vladimir Putin, which he made in early morning yesterday.
“The answers to the questions you just asked can be found in his address. Once again, I draw your attention to the fact that made everything clear in his address. We cannot recognise a government that oppresses its own people and uses genocidal methods against them as democratic.”
Perhaps the person couldn’t read the speech text because the website was suppressed at the time. Lavrov then proceeds to tear this person apart:
“So that we are on the same page, please tell me where you stand when you cover current developments? Does democratic society, the values of which you advocate so vehemently, agree with the efforts to ban the use of a language spoken by the majority of the population? Do democracies that you represent agree with the decision to ban education in the Russian language, or in any other language spoken by the people for that matter, from, say, grade 5? Or, to make illegal the use of one’s mother tongue in everyday life, including shopping, talking to people at hotels or other public places? Is it customary in a democratic society to refer to people in a certain part of the country, in this case Ukraine, as ‘subhuman’ or as a ‘species, as President Zelensky called them? At our talks today we recalled President Poroshenko’s promises after he had been democratically elected. He said that the portion of Ukraine under their control will have everything, including schools, kindergartens, food, leisure and prosperity, whereas those (he pointed to Donbass) will sit and rot in their holes.
“President Vladimir Zelensky said something along these lines when he demanded that those who consider themselves part of Russian culture should get out of Ukraine. Tell me, if English were suddenly banned in Ireland, how would the UK respond to that? Or if French were to be banned in Belgium? I do not think such a legislative initiative would have survived for more than a few days, or even hours. However, in the West, everything is perceived solely through the lens of their own selfish interests. That is, when you are infringed upon in any way, you immediately begin to cause a ruckus about it, but when the linguistic, cultural and religious rights of millions of people in Ukraine are infringed upon, your emphasis shifts from human rights to the ‘democratic’ nature of the local regime.”
I’ve never read that sort of well deserved tirade from Lavrov. It’s a shame I couldn’t post this presser at the time. Then Lavrov attacked the whole of the assembled Western media–I mean WOW!
“I’d be remiss not to mention a CNN correspondent who is cruising around Ukraine and is busy with something on the former line of contact. But during the past eight years, not a single Western news agency, including the respectable media in this audience, has covered the events on the line of contact. At the same time, our journalists worked around the clock on the line of contact on the side of the self-defence units and showed how things really were: how the Ukrainian armed forces destroy the civilian sector, kill women and children, fire shells at sites that must be protected under any circumstances given that it is a war crime to attack them. Things were about the same when NATO aircraft bombed Belgrade deliberately targeting passenger trains crossing bridges and firing shells at the television centre. So, the Ukrainian regime has things to look up to. President of Russia Vladimir Putin said we will see what comes of it depending on the circumstances. He reaffirmed that we are interested in seeing independent Ukrainian people led by a government that represents their diversity, so that they do not end up in a situation where they are totally governed by external forces seeking to encourage neo-Nazism and the genocide of the Russian people and to use Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia.”
Then the next question displays that Western media is 100% deaf:
“Question (retranslated from English): Let’s get rid of the euphemisms. This is not a special military operation, is it? This is a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. How can you justify the conquest of a peaceful nation, your neighbour? Do you believe when you are shelling it, Ukraine will be motivated to move towards the east rather than the west?”
These media people apparently desire to have their innards torn out verbally as Lavrov reloads and fires another two-barrels:
“Sergey Lavrov: I am not an expert on euphemisms. We are far behind Anglo-Saxons in this respect. Take just the descriptions of all those interventions that were carried out against Yugoslavia (in the struggle for democracy), the destruction of Iraq and Libya (this was also a struggle for advancing democracy) with hundreds of thousands of people killed. So I will not even try to compete with you in euphemisms.
“As for your question of what to do with the desires of the Ukrainians who want to be ‘here or there.’ It was necessary to think about this from the very start. President Vladimir Putin warned the NATO countries at the Russia-NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 that they should think twice before proudly stating that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO. This was presented to him as a great compromise that Germany and France managed to reach by replacing the US proposal on the immediate announcement of NATO membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia. At that time, he tried to bring them to reason and asked them not to treat a country that was just in the process of developing its independence like this.
“At that time, the President of Russia said what he wrote in his articles: the Ukrainian state is very fragile and must be treated as such. But our NATO colleagues went straight ahead without any euphemism, with only one aim in mind (in terms of your words about Ukraine moving west or east) – to subordinate the Russian language, and to subjugate the culturally Russian east of Ukraine to its pro-Western, Bandera mentality.
“It is obvious to me that this goal was already set at that time. To avoid a euphemism, we want the Ukrainian people, or as President of Russia Vladimir Putin said, all peoples living on the territory of current Ukraine, to have the opportunity to freely decide their destiny without any attempt to drive them into the vice of Bandera-like psychology.
“Russia will ensure Ukraine’s demilitarisation and de-Nazification. We suffered too much from Nazism. The Ukrainian people also suffered too much from Nazism to shut their eyes to this and take it so lightly.
“Everything is clear as regards demilitarisation. No one would argue. Read memoirs by retired American generals and colonels; they start telling the truth only after they retire, unfortunately. Practically all of them say that the United States would never tolerate the deployment of weapons that could lead to the militarisation of their next door neighbours.
“Since we have now recalled 2008 and the Bucharest Summit, I would like to remind you that later, then US representative at NATO, Ivo Daalder, called this Bucharest decision a major mistake in the history of the Alliance, without using a euphemism.”
I sympathize with Lavrov’s being so confounded by the utter ineptness of Western Media for they are indeed Presstitutes–deaf and dumb, but unfortunately not mute, and prevaricators on top of all that. There’s more in the trascript that I will include when I write this into an article and publish it at my VK Space. But I will add this last bit from Lavrov that’s tells all:
“No one is going to attack the Ukrainian people, or to degrade Ukrainian servicemen. It is about not allowing neo-Nazis and those who promote genocidal methods to run that country. Currently, the Kiev regime is controlled by two external mechanisms: the US-led West and neo-Nazis who are promoting their ‘culture,’ which is flourishing in modern Ukraine.”
IMO, Lavrov ought to have made “culture” plural.
Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 7 2022 20:40 utc | 199
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